Independent Thoughts on the Last Republican Debate

Primary debates are very interesting for someone who doesn't care what party someone is, because they're specifically geared to pull at the emotions of those who are already in one regions of the political landscape. The recent Presidential debate had a lot of expected moments, but some unexpected ones, and some which I think can be used as springboards for more genuinely understanding the politics behind this little experiment we call America.

Note: I'm pulling any quotes below from this CNN transcript of the event, and I've read the debate fact-checking on both Politifact and FactCheck.org, as well as from the ever-entertaining and very-right-leaning conversation taking place on Facebook's General Election 2012 group. Also, I've only found one place that contains the whole CNN/Tea Party Express debate, although it's broken up into a lot of smaller videos.

There'll be another debate tonight - Thursday, September 22, at 9:00 pm ET - run by FoxNews/Google. You can view it streaming online live at this link at 9:00 pm ET. This one will feature the libertarian Gary Johnson, governor of New Mexico, who is a social liberal, fiscal conservative, and seems far saner than Ron Paul. We'll see.

Now, on to my thoughts and commentary on the last debate:

1. The HPV Issue

One issue that's gotten a lot of press was the fact that Rick Perry, as governor of Texas, signed an executive order requiring that girls in the state get a vaccine against the Human Paploma Virus (HPV), which is a sexually-transmitted virus that has been linked to certain forms of cervical cancer. There is voluminous scientific evidence that HPV is very wide-spread, occurring as often as in 50% of sexually-active adults. In other words, if you have sex, there's a very good chance that you'll be exposed to HPV.

Now, I have always considered the debate over HPV to be fairly silly, the ramblings of anti-government puritans who fear that children will become sexually active if told their risk of getting cervical cancer in 30 years is diminished ... but Rick Santorum (of all people) framed it in a way that I think actually has some legal, constitutional, and even logical merit:

Why do we inoculate people with vaccines in public schools? Because we're afraid of those diseases being communicable between people at school. And therefore, to protect the rest of the people at school, we have vaccinations to protect those children.  

Unless Texas has a very progressive way of communicating diseases in their school by way of their curriculum, then there is no government purpose served for having little girls inoculated at the force and compulsion of the government. This is big government run amok. It is bad policy, and it should not have been done. 

The legal justification for mandating innoculation is not to protect that one person, but to protect all of the other people who will get sick if they're exposed to that person's illness. As such, a State does not have the right to implement it. Michelle Bachmann echoed this idea:

... to have innocent little 12-year-old girls be forced to have a government injection through an executive order is just flat out wrong. That should never be done. It's a violation of a liberty interest.

Now, the overall trend of these attacks is on the idea that Perry implemented this as an executive order, which means it never came up for debate in the legislature, and was more of a decree than an actual law... however, as the next point point brings up, even legislation can be dictatorial.

2. When States Attack 

In attacking Romney's "Romneycare" plan (the Massachusetts plan which provided the framework for much of Obamacare, implemented when Romney was a governor of Massachusetts), Michelle Bachmann took a hard line against the government's right to mandate that citizens buy health insurance:

... no state has the constitutional right to force a person as a condition of citizenship to buy a product or service against their will. It's unconstitutional...  (APPLAUSE) ... whether it's the state government or whether it's the federal government

So, here we have two things that the state can mandate which Michelle Bachmann seems to believe are fundamentally against individual liberty. Both Romney and Perry have suggested that they are states' rights issues, and were good for their states, but that similar plans on a national level are unconstitutional, because the Tenth Amendment leaves all rights not expressly granted in the Constitution with the states.

Here is my question:

Based on a strict reading, does the Constitution allow the federal government to strike down an unjust state law?

Obviously, the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) has done this many times - especially in the last century and a half - but this is always a fundamental dividing line between Republicans and Democrats. Democrats feel SCOTUS should have this power, Republicans typically do not. When the court legislates in this manner, the justices are dismissively called "activist judges."

But what if a state implemented an unjust law, then would those who vote it down still be "activist judges?" If SCOTUS overturned Massachusetts' health insurance mandate, would they be violating their Constitutional limitations or defending the liberty of a people who are being oppressed by their state government?

Of course, this question could also be asked about slavery, executions, Jim Crow laws, treatment of women, homosexuals, the mentally handicapped, and other legislation that some states have considered fine and others consider oppressive in some way.

I'd love a Constitutional purist/states' rights advocate to explain what I'm missing on this one and what, if any, role the federal government has to play in such a scenario.

3. Romney & Capital Gains

This was the one aspect of the debate which I found swayed me toward a candidate instead of away from them. Here is Romney's response to a question about a flat tax rate:

The idea of a national sales tax or a consumption tax has a lot to go for it. One, it would make us more competitive globally, as we send products around the world, because under the provisions of the World Trade Organization, you can reimburse that to an exporter. We can't reimburse our taxes right now. It also would level the playing field in the country, making sure everybody is paying some part of their fair share. But the way the fair tax has been structured, it has a real problem and that is it lowers the burden on the very highest income folks and the very lowest and raises it on middle income people. And the people who have been hurt most by the Obama-economy are the middle class.

Back in 2008, I spoke fairly highly of the Fair Tax, which was a flat tax bill that had some enthusiastic support among conservative commentators such as Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck. I liked that the Fair Tax removed all tax burden from the poor, and the notion of taxing consumption rather than income seems just philosophically like a more egalitarian approach.

Until, as Romney points out, you actually run the numbers. What you find really happens is that the tax burden on the poor and the wealthy tend to drop heavily, but the middle class is saddled with a huge tax burden. (I also personally question the validity of many of the economic assumptions behind the Fair Tax, especially in light of the bang-up job economists have done managing the economy over the last decade.)

Romney continues with a proposal that intrigues me:

And so my plan is to take the middle class individuals and dramatically reduce their taxes by the following measure. And that is for middle income Americans, no tax on interest, dividends or capital gains.

If this was handled right, I think this might be a really good tax reform proposal. It depends on how you are dividing "middle income Americans." The benefit is obviously that it will allow low and middle income Americans to keep more money, and this seems like a good way to give a tax break.

However, if Romney extends this exemption too high, then it becomes yet another tax break for the wealthy, and one which they don't need. Capital gains tax rates are not huge. As Warren Buffett said in an interview last month, current capital gains taxes are great for the wealthy.

Well, I think -- what really gives the low rates to the very rich like me is the -- is the low tax on dividends and capital gains.  If you take these rich people what the IRS singles out, from 1992, they’ve almost had a tenfold increase in capital gains.  They’ve had a tenfold increase almost in dividends.  And those -- those are taxed at 15 percent and there’s no payroll tax on it.  Now, the payroll tax accounts for almost as much revenue to the government as the income tax.  It’s close -- $800 billion plus on payroll taxes last year; about $900 billion on income taxes.  That’s where the money comes from in Washington.

The argument in favor of reducing these rates, even among the wealthy, is often that they'll encourage investment, but Buffett sort of refutes that argument based on his experience:

I’ve worked with capital gains rates of 39.9 percent and 36 percent and 25 percent, I have yet to hear one person say to me, "If I call you in the middle of the night Charlie and I say Charlie I’ve got this hot investment idea."  Your reaction is not to say "No matter what the tax rate, forget it, I’m going back to sleep because the capital gains rates are too high."  No, what you’re going to do is you’re going to say, "Tell me the name, quick, Warren, before you change your mind."  And you know, I have never had one person decline to invest with me. 

Okay, I do question that last sentence as perhaps a bit of hyperbole, or maybe he meant "decline to invest with me [because of the capital gains tax]". Still, overall I think this is probably very true. My guess would be that during Mitt Romney's years in the private sector, the capital gains tax was never a cause for someone to avoid investing in one of his businesses, either.

Buffet does a great job of laying out the distinction in how these tax rates get distributed, based on the way your money comes to you:

If you make money with money, you get taxed ... at very low rates; 15 percent dividends in capital gains.  No payroll tax.  If you make money with muscle or hard work or sweat of your brow, you get taxed at rates that move on up.  And most of the people, the middle-class gets taxed at rates of either 15 percent or 25 percent on their income tax, but then they get really hit hard on the payroll tax and that’s what brings the rates in our office up to an average of 36 percent if you leave me out.

Middle income earners, of course, can still "make money with money," in which case they'd get hit with both the payroll tax AND the capital gains tax. If you're talking about someone making a low 3-figure salary, perhaps married, with kids and a mortgage, that could be crippling. So I think reducing the capital gains - in a way that's either got a cap on the amount excluded or has an exemption tied to income - has a lot to go for it.

And, honestly, it strikes me as a common sense plan that could be consistent with both liberal and conservative values, depending on how it were implemented. It's a shame that the government's not going to do anything useful until after the election, or maybe we could get this passed.

4. Herman Cain's Regulatory Reform

I really like Herman Cain. He's a businessman and so says what he thinks. He's the idea guy. And his ideas usually are interesting and make some sense ... until you think about them for 10 seconds.

In the last debate, he said, when responding to how he would handle energy exploration:

I would put together a regulatory reduction commission for every agency starting with the EPA. This regulatory reduction commission -- one of my guiding principles is if you want to solve a problem go to the source closest to the problem. So the people that I would appoint to that commission will be people who have been abused by the EPA. That would be the commission that would straighten out the regulatory burden.

On the surface, this sounds rather sane ... again, until you think about it for five seconds. His "guiding principle" is "if you want to solve a problem go to the source closest to the problem." So, who does he go to in order to solve EPA regulation problems? "People who have been abused by the EPA."

In other words, the group in charge of re-defining EPA regulations would be the people that the EPA has designated as having had the worst track-record of following EPA regulation.

It seems like Cain basically believes that the EPA just shouldn't do it's job, which is fine ... but he's going to use this strategy to "put together a regulatory reduction commission for every agency."

Who is going to be on the regulatory reduction commission for the Pentagon? The people who have been abused by the Pentagon? Does this mean terrorists will be on the commission?

Will criminals be reviewing Justice Department regulations?

Like I said ... his plans sound good, until you take a few seconds to think them through.

This September 11, Reject the Enemy Meme

A year ago, I posted the following message on Facebook and my 40 Days of Giving blog:

I have no enemies. There are people out there who want me, or those I love, dead for some abstract reason, but such a person is not my enemy. I wish them no ill. I have no deeper desire than that they find something in their life that brings them pure love, joy, and peace. I wish for them - as I wish for my sons, dearest friends, and myself - nothing but the best that the world has to offer.

That was how I commemorated the ninth anniversary of September 11, and I think it well sums up the sentiments I'm feeling come this anniversary.

The world makes more sense if we can draw lines between ourselves and others, and declare the people on the other side of that line the enemy. They are bad and we are good. We are heroes and they are villains.

I call this the "enemy meme" - the idea that these lines have real meaning, and that this "enemy" designation has some sort of real value, that it somehow helps make the world a better or safer place. (In fairness, after September 11, even I fell victim to embracing the "enemy meme" for several years.)

In the realm of politics, the "enemy meme" is especially prevalent, and we're such a politically charged society that it's hard to avoid it. Consider the recent case with union leader Jimmy Hoffa Jr. calling Republicans "Sons of Bitches" and invoking militant terminology, about becoming an army in support of the Democrats. In this vivid scenario, the Republicans are the enemy, and the union forces are the heroic army.

Does such talk really help anybody, including the people making them?

I don't think so. These attempts to dehumanize others, to build a wall, never lead to any sort of reconciliation or healing. When they are invoked, though, I don't think that reconciliation or healing is the goal. I suspect that Jimmy Hoffa Jr., when he spoke those lines, cared little about healing the economic problems of the country. I suspect that when militant terminology was invoked by Republican candidates in the 2010 midterms, those candidates were more concerned with winning than with reconciliation or healing.

I think such efforts are fundamentally misguided, and here's why:

Life isn't a zero-sum game. You don't win by making the other guys lose. You win by figuring out a way to make even more people come out ahead.

Back to September 11 and the War on Terror. Consider that the fighting has resulted in the death of 30,000 Pakistani civilians, upward of 4,000 Afghanistan civilians, upward of 98,000 Iraqi civilians, as well as the death of nearly 6,000 American soldiers (in both Afghanistan and Iraq). That's over 138,000 deaths of people who were in no way connected to the 9/11 attacks, and the overall impact, when taking into account the wounded, is far above that. Even if you question the methodology used (perhaps "civilian" includes non-uniformed enemy combatants or something), even scaled back to just 25% of that count, you'd still get 34,500 deaths!

Think about it again:

It would have taken nearly 12 to 46 successful September-11-scale attacks to equal the total innocent death toll of the response to September 11.

Now, I am not arguing that we shouldn't have taken out the Taliban or Osama bin Laden, and certainly that we shouldn't act in our nation's security interests. I'm just pointing out that, by the numbers, the war following September 11 has been much more devastating than the event itself.

While the attacks on September 11 were tragic, the response - the loss of life, and also the growth of hatred and animosity - has been just as tragic, if not more so. When we think of 9/11, it's our obligation to those who died to think of all of the victims, not just the ones who died that day.

The most profound stories of healing and overcoming the tragedy, I find, are the ones about the people who refuse to accept the "enemy meme" that so many of us are so ready to embrace:


Consider the two 9/11 widows - both pregnant at the time of the 2001 attacks - who began a charity, Beyond the 11th, to help Afghanistan widows, as chronicled in the documentary Beyond Belief (also available for streaming through Netflix or purchase through Amazon and other retailers). They have recognized that their healing lies in serving the victims on the other side of the tragedy.

Or the mother of a 9/11 victim who has established a friendship with the mother of one of the convicted 9/11 co-conspirators. They describe their friendship - an active symbol of the most profound forgiveness imaginable - in the TED video embedded below.



And, finally, consider another TED video, this one by the Muslim Naif Al-Mutawa, creator of the Islamic-based comic book The 99, which features 99 heroes from around the world, each of whom has a different power based on 99 virtues that the Koran states are inherent in the nature of Allah. (At least that's my understanding of the religious connection to the series, based on Al-Mutawa's 2010 TED talk.) From within the Muslim community, he is attempting to speak out against the view of "us" against "them" to propose a profound message of unity and peace, of cooperation, toward a brighter future. He refuses to acknowledge the "enemy" role with which the militant fanatics in the Muslim world attempt to brand the non-Muslim world.

The enemy isn't a religion, or even men who want to kill us for whatever reason. The true enemy is the hatred that makes them want to kill us. Yes, of course, we must defend ourselves against those who would act on that hatred, but it is the hatred that we must figure out how to abolish.

I believe that the only true enemy is the ideology of hatred, no matter what tradition it is rooted in.

This September 11, I hope you agree.

And, if you don't, you still aren't my enemy (though I suspect that your ideology may be), and I still wish you nothing but the most profound happiness in life. I believe it can only be found in loving others - all others - as much as you possibly can ... and then doing it a little bit more.

Give it a try for a time and I am certain you'll be surprised with how good it feels.

Being Literal, In the Figurative Sense

Years ago, a dear friend of mine described one of his pet peeves:

people who use the word "literally" incorrectly

Specifically, I recall him describing a prolonged conversation with a Taco Bell employee who complained that his car was "literally" a piece of shit and would not understand that, while his car might be very junky, it was not possible for it to be "literally a piece of shit" and also to be a car. It had to be either one or the other. (Or, I suppose, a piece of shit shaped like a car.)

Ever since then, I've caught myself becoming frustrated when I hear the word "literally" used incorrectly, when the word "figuratively" is what is intended.

Well, little did I know that there's a name for it, as outlined by Steven Pinker in his book The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature. Here's the relevant passage, where he's discussing people who gain:

... entry into the club called AWFUL - Americans Who Figuratively Use "Literally." The charter member was Rabbi Baruch Korff, a defender of Richard Nixon during his Watergate ordeal, who at one point protested, "The American press has literally emasculated President Nixon."

Another fun one that I heard recently was on PBS' Frontline episode "The Warning," about the woman who in the late 1990s sounded the alarm about the housing finance crisis. Here's a quote from Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Ron Susskind, describing the situation in which this woman found herself when going up against Alan Greenspan and others on this issue:

... she is literally in the crossfire of an amazing number of bullets.

Unless Greenspan is a lot more cutthroat than described in the documentary, this is certainly not "literally" true. But if this sort of statement can be made by a Pulitzer-winner, there's hope for the rest of us!

Such fun little tangents are frequent in Pinker's book, which presents the over-arching argument that language provides us with a window into fundamental human nature. Along the way, however, he addresses a lot of linguistic peculiarities, including the origin of swearing, one of the more fun chapters (especially listening to it in audiobook version).

Behemoth - World War Steampunk

Scott Westerfeld has created a brilliant steampunk alternate history, where forces wielding darwinian monsters clash with mechanical monstrosities, in his new trilogy, which started with the 2009 release of Leviathan and continues with the 2010 book Behemoth. This trilogy has some valuable lessons about history, class structure, gender roles, biology, and mechanics. And, like Westerfeld's previous Uglies trilogy, it's a ripping good yarn ... although it takes a bit of build-up to reach that point.

It Starts with Leviathan

First, the backstory:

In the real world, there was this big war around the beginning of the last century which they called The Great War, but which we now call World War I. It began with the assassination of the Archduke of Austria-Hungary, Franz Ferdinand, on June 28, 1914, but there were a lot of secret treaties and things that played into the mix. Also assassinated on that date (though I didn't know it until reading Leviathan) was Ferdinand's wife, Sophie Chotek, who was not nearly as noble as the Archduke. They left behind three children.

That is pretty much where reality is left behind, because in this version of the story there is only one child, Aleksandar. After his parents are assassinated, he is secreted away in a giant war machine by his father's closest friends and allies, because it turns out that the Germans orchestrated the assassination of the Archduke in order to have an excuse for war. They want to put Aleksandar under house arrest and probably kill him. For reasons which are not clear until toward the end of Leviathan, it is vitally important that Aleksandar not be captured or killed, because he actually has the potential to end the war. I won't give it away, because it's a clever plot twist.

Meanwhile, there is a tangential story about a girl named Deryn who is impersonating a boy in order to join the British Air Service. She is stationed aboard a genetically-engineered living airship, the Leviathan, the largest airship in the BAS. The Leviathan sets sail to take part in the new war that's breaking out.

The most annoying thing about the first book is that it takes so long for these two divergent plot threads to connect together. Alek is running all over Austria-Hungary trapped in a tin can with legs while Deryn is riding around on a flying whale. War is imminent, shots have been fired, but neither seems in a position to really do much about it until the very end, when the two plot threads do come together.

Fortunately, the second book more than makes up for any frustrations in the first one ... but first, a side note on the setting.

Original novel artwork.
New artwork from paperback edition
is shown below.

Nature vs. Machine

As you may have noticed, I've dropped some phrases like "giant war machine" and "genetically-engineered living airship" as if they made sense, when obviously such things didn't exist in 1914. As Westerfeld explains in the "Afterward" to Leviathan, the first armored fighting machines (i.e. tanks) didn't actually enter the war until 1916. The versions in Leviathan don't run on treads, though, they're giant mechanical constructs that walk on two or more legs. Their aptitude at creating these mechanical creatures have resulted in the people of Germany and Austria-Hungary to become known as the Clankers.

The people of Britain, on the other hand, are Darwinists, who weave the "threads of life" (in other words, DNA) to create living machines, such as "message lizards" which can follow complicated commands and deliver a precise verbal message. The machines are not intelligent, not self-aware, but they are useful.

And they are also, to the Clankers, unholy abominations. The separation between the Darwinists and the Clankers is fundamentally a religious and spiritual one. The Darwinists view themselves as utilizing the scientific powers of nature in a noble way, while the Clankers think they're subverting the order of the natural world and defying God.

There are obvious parallels here with modern concepts of technological progress, genetic manipulation, bioethics, and spirituality, but they don't get belabored in the book and I certainly don't intend to belabor them here. I'll get into the sequel, after the official book trailer (which you may, of course, feel free to skip).

On to Behemoth

The first book ends with Deryn and Aleksandar both on board the Leviathan. (To find out how that happens, you'll have to read the book.) Alek knows, however, that he's technically an enemy, since he's an Austrian nobleman. The British need him (again, you'll have to read to find out why), but he's soon to outlive his usefulness, at which point he will be either sent back to England or at least be locked in a brig somewhere until the war is over.

The Leviathan heads to Istanbul (not Constantinople) to extend a peace offering to the sultan of the Ottoman Empire. See, Winston Churchill has commandeered a ship that was grown for the Ottomans, and they're not too happy about it. They have already paid for it, after all. (This is based on a real event, although in the real world it was a warship and not a genetic creation.)

Seeing his chance, Alek makes a break for it. In Istanbul, he is forced to really decide how he wants to approach this war, what side he wants to be on, and whether or not he's in a position to make a real difference. He also reveals all of his secrets to Deryn ... who is still keeping one rather large secret from him, in the form of her gender (and her romantic interest in him).

All of the groundwork that Westerfeld spent establishing the character relationships in the first book pays off in this the sequel. When I finished the first book, I honestly wasn't completely certain what I felt about it. It was good, but not phenomenal as a stand-alone effort. It established a rich world, full of potential, but I knew that the success of the trilogy hinged on the second book knocking things out of the park.


Behemoth takes this potential and leverages it into a wild ride through a dynamic world that contains both war beasts and combat machines, including strange devices like a Tesla cannon! It more than eliminates the doubts I had after completing the first book.

Honestly, after reading Behemoth my only complaint is that this is still being promoted as a trilogy, and I don't see how he can resolve everything in just one more book. Things just started getting good and I, for one, would like to see the concept drawn out a bit, the world explored in more depth. My vote would be for about 5 books.

(You don't want to stretch these things out too far, else you fall into the trap of Orson Scott Card's Alvin Maker series, which started in 1987, has 6 books out, and still isn't done.)

Conclusion

This is a rich series in fully-realized alternate history setting. It can be appreciated on a number of levels, and I personally think that this trilogy would be perfect to structure some sort of inter-disciplinary enrichment around. Students could read the trilogy, then have discussions about the historical and social aspects of the novels, as well as the literary ones. It's rare when a trilogy can spark discussions about the bioethical considerations in genetic manipulation and the morality of warfare at the same time.

Or, of course, you could just read the book and enjoy it, without going in for all of the subtext.

You could ... but why would you really want to?

2010 Reading List

As always, I like to recap the year in the form of the books that I've read, which often provide some indication of how my year is going and how my thinking has been transformed over the year. I read 21 books and also listened to 39 audiobooks, for a resounding 60 books consumed.

1. Life After Death: The Evidence by Dinesh D'Souza (audiobook)
2. The Third Jesus by Deepak Chopra (audiobook)
3. Super Freakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes, and Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance by Steven D. Levitt & Stephen J. Dubner (audiobook)
4. The Lost Symbol by Dan Brown (audiobook)
5. Excuses Begone by Dr. Wayne Dyer (audiobook)
6. The Biology of Belief by Bruce H. Lipton, Ph.D. (audiobook)
7. The Secrets of an Inspirational (In-Spirit) Life by Dr. Wayne Dyer (audiobook)
8. The Generosity Factor by Ken Blanchard & S. Truett Cathy (audiobook)
9. Giving: How Each of Us Can Change the World by Bill Clinton (audiobook)
10. The Compassionate Instinct: The Science of Human Goodness edited by Dacher Keltner, Jeremy Adam Scott, and Jason Marsh
11. The New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose by Eckhart Tolle (audiobook)
12. Thank You Power: Making the Science of Gratitude Work for You by Deborah Norville (audiobook)
13. The Secret by Rhonda Byrne (audiobook)
14. God Has a Dream by Desmund Tutu (audiobook)
15. The Power of Giving: How Giving Back Enriches Us All by Azim Jamal & Harvey McKinnon
16. How to Change the World: Social Entrepreneurs and the Power of New Ideas by David Bornstein
17. Uglies by Scott Westerfeld (audiobook)
18. Pretties by Scott Westerfeld (audiobook)
19. The 8th Habit: From Effectiveness to Greatness by Stephen R. Covey (audiobook)
20. Born to Be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life by Dacher Keltner
21. Wicked Lovely by Melissa Marr (audiobook)
22. Play Money: Or, How I Quit My Day Job and Made Millions Trading Virtual Loot by Julian Dibbell (audiobook)
23. Specials by Scott Westerfield (audiobook)
24. From Eternity to Here: The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time by Sean Carroll
25. WWW: Watch by Robert J. Sawyer
26. Extras by Scott Westerfeld (audiobook)
27. The Power of Serving Others: You Can Start Where You Are by Gary Morsch and Dean Nelson
28. Ink Exchange by Melissa Marr (audiobook)
29. Fragile Eternity by Melissa Marr (audiobook)
30. Leviathan by Scott Westerfeld (audiobook)
31. The Magicians by Lev Grossman (audiobook)
32. Identity Theft and Other Stories by Robert J. Sawyer
33. The Shadow Effect by Deepak Chopra, Debbie Ford, and Marianne Williamson (audiobook)
34. New Rules for the New Economy by Kevin Kelly
35. Philanthrocapitalism by Matthew Bishop & Michael Green
36. Singularity Sky by Charles Stross (audiobook)
37. The Age of Empathy by Frans de Waal
38. Mendela's Way: Fifteen Lessons on Life, Love, and Courage by Richard Stengel (audiobook)
39. Iron Sunrise by Charles Stross (audiobook)
40. 29 Gifts by Camille Walker
41. Spook: The Science of the Afterlife by Mary Roach (audiobook)
42. The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson
43. The Girl Who Played with Fire by Stieg Larsson
44. The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Next by Stieg Larsson (audiobook)
45. The Amber Spyglass by Philip Pullman (audiobook)
46. Boneshaker by Cherie Priest
47. Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void by Mary Roach (audiobook)
48. The Grand Design by Stephen Hawking & Leonard Mlodinow (audiobook)
49. The Mermaid's Madness by Jim C. Hines
50. God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything by Christopher Hitchens (audiobook)
51. The Portable Atheist: Essential Readings for the Nonbeliever edited by Christopher Hitchens (audiobook)
52. Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know -- and Doesn't by Stephen Prothero (audiobook)
53. Star Wars: The Force Unleashed by Sean Williams (abridged audiobook)
54. Star Wars: The Force Unleashed II by Sean Williams (audiobook)
55. Keeper of Dreams by Orson Scott Card
56. Clementine by Cherie Priest
57. The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins
58. Matched by Ally Condie
59. Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins
60. Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk by David Sedaris (audiobook)

Jews & Atheists Top Ratings in Religious Literacy Study

Which religious groups know the most about their own (and other) religious faiths? Some interesting results along these lines were announced this week from the U.S. Religious Knowledge Survey performed by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life. There's some really great information to be culled from these results about how religious information is distributed in America, so I'm going to delve into it a bit for my own gratification ... and you're welcome to come along for the journey.

World Religious Symbols
(Art provided by http://thegoldguys.blogspot.com/)

My Results
First, allow me to be self-indulgent for a moment and share my own results. The Pew Forum website has a 15-question quiz so you can find out how you rank up. I took the quiz and got 13 out of 15 (a score of 87%), which puts me above 93% of the U.S. population in religious knowledge. Only 3% of the population would have scored higher than me.

My two mistakes were that I didn't know the dominant religion in Pakistan and I mis-identified one of the key figures in the original Great Awakening. Only 11% got the Great Awakening question correct, but the Pakistan question has a fairly high rate at 68%. Honestly, on the Pakistan question I out-thought myself, because my gut instinct was correct but I figured that I was giving in to a stereotype and the real answer was probably something else. I should have gone with my gut. (There's a reason some stereotypes exist, I suppose.)

Interesting Results on the Quiz
Sorting through the data on the quiz yields some interesting results, which really just go to show that you have to really consider the data carefully. The overall population scores an average of 50% on the quiz. Here are some various breakdowns:

By Religion

• Jewish - 65%
• Atheist/Agnostic - 64%
• Mormon - 61%
• White evangelical Protestant - 54%
• White Catholic - 51%   
• White mainline Protestant - 48%
• Nothing in particular - 48%
• Black Protestant - 42%
• Hispanic Catholic - 39%

By Worship Service Attendance

• At least weekly - 52%
• Monthly/yearly - 48%
• Seldom/Never - 49%

By Gender

• Men - 52%
• Women - 48%

By Education

• Post-graduate training - 68%
• College graduate - 61%
• Some college - 54%
• High school or less - 40%

Now, remember, the above stats are the scores on the 15-question quiz, as compared with results from a nationally-representative sample of 3,412 adults. (The overall survey involved a total of 32 questions.)

Sorting through the data, there are some unsurprising results and some very surprising ones.

For one thing, we see the evidence that education in general also means you're more informed on religious matters. Growing up on the northern tip of the Bible belt, this merely confirms the evidence of a lifetime of frustrating conversations. If you're ignorant about everything else on Monday, chances are you were ignorant about church on Sunday. (It may also be of interest to consider this data from OKTrends which analyzes the writing proficiency levels of different religious groups on the OKCupid dating site. You'll have to scroll toward the end, past all the racial analysis, to get to the religious group data.)

Surprisingly, the people who never attend worship service do a little better than those who attend infrequently. The effect is only 1%, so doesn't mean much statistically, but it's not really surprising if you think about it. The atheists, who score high, presumably fall in the never/seldom category (along with many of the low-scoring "nothing in particular" group), while the people who go only monthly or yearly probably include many of the mid-range Catholics, mainline Protestants, and some of the "nothing in particular"group (who get dragged along to Easter service by their grandmothers). The result is that the group that has made a conscious decision to turn away from a religious life may be more well informed on religious issues than those who practice their religion in an indifferent fashion.

Item Breakdown
Now here are some extremely surprising results, from the item-by-item breakdown analysis by religious group. (There are answers given away in the data below, so if you want to know your rating take the quiz before reading further.)

• There are 6% of self-identified Jews do not know when the Jewish Sabbath begins. (This is kind of a trick question - their Sabbath is Saturday, but it begins at dusk on Friday - though this shouldn't really trip up a Jew.)
• There are 7% of self-identified Mormons who do not know the religion of Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism. In fairness, though, if they'd asked what religion Jesus practiced, most people would have probably gotten it wrong, too. (Hint: He was circumcised.)
• 90% of Jews and 75% of atheists/agnostics correctly identified Ramadan as an Islamic holy month. No other religious group got higher than 55% on this question, and the only 52% of the overall population got it right. (Note that Muslims are not included in this data analysis. Presumably they'd have done well.)
• Only 59% percent of White Catholics and 47% of Hispanic Catholics know that the communion is, in their church's view, a literal consumption of the body/blood of Jesus and not a symbolic one. This is a concept known as transubstantiation. Catholics who are not aware of it should ask their priest about it and watch him stammer all over himself as he tries to explain it in a way that makes sense.
• For reasons I can't fathom, only 39% identified Job as the "Bible figure most closely associated with remaining obedient to God despite suffering." (By comparison, 38% knew that Vishna and Shiva were central to Hinduism.) Jews really tanked on this one, with only 47%. Oddly, Mormons know their Book of Job - they got 70% on this one, far outstripping the 58% from white evangelical Protestants.
• One question which all groups were uniformly well-informed on (89% got it right) was that public school teachers could not lead children in prayer. However, only 23% knew that teachers could reference the Bible passages as an example of literature. (Again, the Jews and atheists/agnostics, being the big readers of the group, were the ones who got this the most correctly, although still only in the low 40 percentiles.) More on this later.
• Ironically, white evangelical protestants (52%), white mainline Protestants (46%), and black Protestants (40%) could not identify the man behind the Protestant Reformation as well as Jews (70%), atheists/agnostics (68%), and Mormons (61%) could.

The Results in General

Though Jews and atheists/agnostics did best overall, on questions specifically related to Christianity and the Bible, the white evangelical Protestants and Mormons did slightly better.

The Mormons, especially, know their stuff. My guess is that this is, at least in part, due to the fact that they must continually defend the idea that their religion is in fact a form of Christianity, especially against the white evangelical Protestants, many of whom believe they are a bizarre heathen cult that corrupts Christianity. (Or, in the case of Mormon Glenn Beck, the best hope for "restoring honor" to our nation.)

I think a similar issue comes with the atheists/agnostics. Most people are not born into this belief system, they come to it through analysis of their options and thoughtful rejection of the status quo. Not only did it require thought and study to reach this position, but many have to justify it over and over again to family and friends. Like the Mormons, they are in a continual intellectual conflict with mainstream America over their choice of religious views.

Judaism probably scores high for a very different reason.  The Jewish faith is one that prizes scholarship and study. their entire religious identity is tied to the fact that during their many wanderings (some voluntary, some involuntary), they maintained a strict book of cultural stories and laws which helped them maintain their unity as a people. During the diaspora in Babylon, they became a people of the book. So it's not surprising that Jews are, on average, a bit more well informed than Christians. Christianity cherishes love, emotion, and faith over more thoughtful religious methods. (This is, of course, an over-generalization of both Judaism and Christianity, but we're talking about the average in this case, so I feel that generalities are justified.)

Religion in Schools
I'm still culling through all of this data, but one thing that I find endlessly fascinating are the clear misconceptions that this study demonstrates. For example, while the most correctly-answered question  was  about whether teachers could lead prayer in public school, there was amazing misunderstanding about other aspects of how religion can show up in the public education system.

The Supreme Court has clearly ruled that public schools can offer comparative religion courses and can study passages from the Bible as part of literary and historical studies, but the vast majority of respondents didn't know this to be true. In the words of the study's executive summary:

Together, this block of questions suggests that many Americans think the constitutional restrictions on religion in public schools are tighter than they really are.

Again, this comes to a matter of education. I find that the people who complain most about the lack of religion in schools aren't really that informed about what religion in school constituted. Think about it ... does any religious person really want a public school teacher to be responsible for the religious education of their child? Do they really feel it's justifiable that Jewish children be forced to study Christian teachings? Even among Christianity, what if the teacher holds different viewpoints? How does a teacher respond to a student's question about faith healing, speaking in tongues, or angels and demons? These are things that some Christian traditions teach are literal, true, and fundamental elements of the faith, and others view as largely symbolic. What if the teacher is a Mormon or Catholic and the parent is an evangelical Protestant?

In fact, the more religious you are at home, the greater the danger that your faith teachings to your child will be called into question by religious instruction in public school, because the school will have to provide a broad range of religious instruction to satisfy the broad population they serve.

Part of the opposition to religion in public schools was that Catholic children were being converted by the overtly-Protestant education in the school system. Surely a Protestant parent in Utah does not want Mormonism being taught to their child, nor does a Mormon parent anywhere else want their religious teachings to be called into question.

But, of course, many people don't think about the issues very carefully. They react not with their (dare I say God-given) reason and thought, but with emotion and faith, to recall a false nostalgia where times were simpler. It is almost always a myth ... like the myth, apparently, that going to church on a regular basis makes one significantly more well informed on religion than those who don't attend.

And, on that note:

Conundrum Computing Contraption

Authors Jeff VanderMeer and Ann VanderMeer are editing a strange collection: The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities. (The image on the right is a preliminary cover from the proposal, not the cover of the actual book - due out in 2011.) The book - a sequel, of sorts, to the The Thackery T. Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric & Discredited Diseases - sounds like it'll be a steampunk-ish collection of stories detailing the curious objects located in the home of the illustrious Thackery T. Lambshead after his death.

A few weeks back, the VanderMeers put out a call for micro-submissions on this collection. Small entries of curiosities to be included in a listing in the back of the book, as a supplement to the complete short stories that will make up the bulk of the book. I submitted an idea, but it wasn't selected.

While disappointed, I figured it would be nice to share the idea (since, at the moment, I have no particular plans to use it in a story myself). You can view the other micro-subs by scrolling down to the comments section on this page.

CONUNDRUM COMPUTING CONTRAPTION - Wooden box with a hinged top, the 3C opens to reveal a mechanical device similar to a massive typewriter, containing 26 keys corresponding to the letters of the alphabet and a toggle with settings “Encrypt” or “Decrypt.” Mathematician Alan Turing built the device, which can create a unique, unbreakable cryptogram and can decode any other system’s encryption algorithm. Turing contacted British intelligence about the 3C in 1954, but due to his “suicide” days later, there was no recorded follow up. The next mention of the 3C was in 1987, when it was confiscated for national security purposes by MI-6 following its implication in the Black Monday stock market collapse. How it came into Dr. Lambshead’s possession is unknown. It is currently being safeguarded by the World Bank, until such time as reliable quantum encryption techniques render it obsolete.